Date: Fri, 18 Feb 2000 12:03:37 +1100 From: Patryk Zadarnowski <patrykz@ilion.eu.org> To: "Sam Leffler" <sam@errno.com> Cc: "Marco van de Voort" <marcov@stack.nl>, freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: 64bit OS? Message-ID: <200002180103.MAA23445@mycenae.ilion.eu.org> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Thu, 17 Feb 2000 16:39:48 -0800." <0d9e01bf79a8$a957e680$0132a8c0@MELANGE>
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> > > > Which leads to my potentially ignorant question: Where is FreeBSD > > > > w/regards to running on the Itanium (or other 64bit chips)? > > > > > > Waiting for somebody at Intel to give us either hardware or simulator > > > time. Without either of those things, "working on" Itanium support > > > is a pretty pointless exercise. > > > > Just a thought: > > > > One could use the released 64-bit Itanium gcc, create a i386->itanium > > crosscompiler, and start preparing some stuff? > > Marco van de Voort (MarcoV@Stack.nl) > > <http://www.stack.nl/~marcov/xtdlib.htm>; > > > > The difficult bits rarely have anything to do with compilers and such > (especially given that most of the code has been through a 64-bit port to > the alpha). The system-mode pieces of IA-64/Merced were not public until > recently; I noticed the full document set just became available on the intel > web site this week. There's also the Linux port that was posted to the web > in the past week or two; that should show what's needed for a FreeBSD port. The Linux port is extremely minimalistic and uses the minimum amout of IA-64 features to get the OS to do anything useful. > Of course, as was mentioned before, without hardware or a simulator it's > pretty pointless to put much effort into something like this. Also, you'll find that the actual silicon is somewhat different from the documentation: whole chunks of the architecture are either unimplemented or covered by errata, and not planned to be fixed in the public Itanium silicon. The OS teams that signed NDAs with Intel (including the Linux team: most of their code has been written by IA-64 teams at Intel and HP) have been cooperating very closely with Intel and were given a lot of information that (most of us) can only dream about. That is to say: even the simulator wouldn't help much right now. On the other hand, IA-64 is a very exotic architecture from the OS's point of view, and anyone planning to port *BSD to it should probably start planning ASAP. Pat. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
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